UCLA In the News October 16, 2017

At UCLA, scientists at the school’s Anxiety and Depression Research Center discovered that the more anxious a person feels going into an exposure exercise, and the more surprised he or she is by the result, the more effective it is at competing with an original negative association or traumatic memory.

“I’m not sure what that means,” [UCLA’s Nadereh] Pourat said. “Obamacare is a relief, and taking it away is going to be lack of relief. This is not a new idea. We lived it and competition didn’t work. We had millions of people not insured, millions of people could not afford coverage. We know it didn’t work, I don’t know why it would magically work today.”

“There are all kinds of references,” said Alex Hall, professor of atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA. “It’s kind of amazing, the extent to which these winds have entered into pop culture and movies.”

“The government cannot pressure a business into engaging in patriotic speech,” said Eugene Volokh, a free speech scholar at the UCLA School of Law. “But it seems pretty clear that whatever action the NFL is going to take is going to be because of the very real risk of public reaction due to the drop off in enthusiasm for the NFL.”

The UCLA professor Eugene Volokh once criticized this microaggressions sheet for going beyond “evenhandedly trying to prevent insult” to actively stigmatizing contested viewpoints, an inappropriate measure for administrators at a public university.

“California is a large state and if we can make these changes to our administrative systems, then certainly other states are capable of doing that,” [UCLA’s Jody] Herman said. “As gender identities continue to expand and our concepts of gender continue to expand, governments are going to have to grapple with it and figure out how to be responsive to the way people understand themselves and live their lives.”

“The donors are not better off in the end,” said Gabriel Danovitch, director of the kidney transplant program at UCLA and a vocal opponent of organ sales. “When you are that hopeless, giving that person a lump of money while lowering their self-esteem at the same time doesn’t help them. It’s an act of desperation, not an act of love.”

Still, the drugs’ overall impact is clear, said Dr. Antoni Ribas, a melanoma specialist at UCLA who has conducted clinical trials on Keytruda. Immunotherapy drugs, he said, “are changing how we treat cancer.”

“This is what was so extraordinary about this event,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, told Inside Climate News. “Essentially it was a forest fire, a wildfire, that moved into an urban area. At some point it was jumping from house to house, not tree to tree.”

“I am amazed by the changes that took place over the years. When I first came to China, the authorities’ priorities were economic concerns instead of public health and the environment,” said [Roger] Detels, who is professor of the UCLA School of Public Health’s epidemiology department in the United States.

Even so, the findings add to the evidence that aspirin is underused as a tool to prevent heart disease, said Dr. Gregg Fonarow of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Prior studies have also shown that release of guidelines or national recommendations alone is not sufficient to influence care or treatment of patients,” Fonarow said.

“The Clean Power Plan was important to California because it was going to bring other states on board with its trajectory,” says [Cara Horowitz, a law professor with the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA]. “Absent that federal prod, the state needs to go back to convincing other states to become partners” in the climate fight.